Word: tillman
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...fall of 1993, as a high school senior, Tillman got into a more serious kind of trouble. Coming to the defense of a friend involved in a fight outside a pizza parlor, he beat his adversary so severely that he was eventually arrested and charged as a juvenile with felony assault. Tillman entered a guilty plea, and the following summer spent 30 days in a juvenile-detention facility, all the while worrying that he might lose the scholarship offered him by Arizona State. He didn't, and on his release his conviction was reduced to a misdemeanor. Years later...
...where few people knew of the arrest, they called him the Hitman--but this time, for what he did on the field. He lacked both the size of a typical college linebacker and the speed of a running back, but he was dogged and smart. In his senior year Tillman was named Pac-10 Conference Defensive Player of the Year --no small trick for a guy who weighed 202 lbs. in a world where your average lineman looks like a major appliance with a helmet. When a reporter congratulated him, Tillman admitted that he was proud to win but allowed...
Standing still just wasn't something he did. People talk about Tillman's charisma and his instantly authoritative manner. In 1995 Mike McBride was still new to his job as an academic counselor in ASU's athletic department when Tillman, a shaggy-haired freshman, first walked into his office to ask him how many classroom hours he would need to graduate. When McBride told him, Tillman shot back that it was McBride's job to make sure he didn't do any more or any less. "I had a weird reaction," says McBride. "I almost said, 'Yes, sir'--except...
...Tillman made a career out of turning no into yes. His college football coach Bruce Snyder told Tillman that he might have to redshirt him--hold him back--for his first year. Perhaps Snyder was expecting him to grow. "He looked me dead in the eye and said, 'Coach, I'm not going to redshirt.' I thought he didn't understand what I meant," says Snyder, "so I started to explain it. But he said, 'Coach, you don't have to play me. I'm going to graduate in four years, so as long as I'm around...
...Tillman helped the Sun Devils come achingly close to a national championship in that year's Rose Bowl. All the same, prior to the NFL draft the following year, the labels "too small" and "too slow" still clung to him. He came to the Cardinals as a seventh-round pick, 226th out of 241 overall. His signing bonus was meal money by NFL standards, just $21,000. Since he didn't have a car, he commuted to the Cards' training camp riding his green Schwinn bicycle. "But you couldn't tell him he couldn't make...